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This chapter moves the sociological analysis and understanding of emotions to considerations of processual and structural issues, located in the context of a discussion of U.S. health care settings and organizations. These, the authors argue, represent prime cases of substantial ongoing change, especially increasing rationalization, in contexts where emotions are significantly embedded in the work, thus generating a theoretically intriguing tension between demands for affective neutrality and desires for particularity. Transitions in these health care systems bring forth new structures where expectations, deeply ingrained in professional care-givers and related to important emotional and social issues, are no longer appropriate and new emotional responses have not yet been sufficiently developed or are fragmented. In opening up these questions of emotions in cultural, social and economic change, a topic thus far little explored in the growing literature on emotions, the authors therefore move the analysis of emotions from point in time issues to a more dynamic view. In doing so, they draw on previously developed concepts and positions such as emotional labour, feeling rules, the sentimental order, and the relationship of structure to emotions and evocative transformations, concluding with an agenda for future research utilizing comparisons of other settings such as business and industry.

This chapter will draw on the work of Norbert Elias and Marjorie Morgan in order to place our understanding of emotion within a sociohistorical context. Attention is paid to the implications of this work for our current theorizing around emotional labour, informalization, and gender and emotion. Some critical consideration is also given to limitations in the work of Elias, particularly in regard to the metanarratival ambitions evinced in his work. The chapter will attempt to further our understanding of emotion through a consideration of the development of emotion codes from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries in France and England. Such emotion codes will be explored through the historical analysis of their inscription within the social practices of civility, manners and etiquette. The argument to develop this kind of analysis follows directly from that supportive of social/cultural constructionist perspectives, and their emphasis upon the plasticity of emotion and its lack of an essential universal vocabulary. For once one acknowledges that emotion is socially constructed one is also implicitly drawing attention to the historical, based on the simple argument that the social and cultural are historically formed.

This chapter explores the limitations of the cultural constructionist approach to emotion. The concept of culture continues to dominate knowledge production in contemporary anthropology. It has considerable importance in sociology as well, and, partly through the burgeoning field of cultural studies, has had increasing impact in the social sciences and humanities more generally. Culture is typically represented as a complex system of symbols, meanings, categories, models, or schemata that structure experience and action. The limitations of the anthropological application of the concepts of culture and symbol become most apparent in the treatment of emotion. Implications of the overall ideational bias of constructionism are frequently underacknowledged. This is a crucial matter in the case of emotion. In constructionist treatments, emotion is generally understood in primarily ideational terms, i.e. as a cognitive or mental phenomenon which is subject to cultural production. The apprehension of emotion in this sense is seen to be achieved through an understanding of cultural categories of emotion and expression. This is not to deny the importance of culture in the experience of emotion, through its conceptual and expressive forms, and in behaviour. It is to say that the exploration of the influence of culture in these is neither the beginning nor the end of the matter. The notion of cultural construction might even be seen as a misnomer in that cultural information does not actually construct anything, rather, it is important as it arises as part of the shaping of the organizational possibilities of interacting parties

This chapter explores the relation between emotions and social agency on the relevance of emotions for a reconstructed Habermasian project of communicative action. As the author argues, although Habermas has been influential in the current move towards intersubjective approaches to social action, he can nonetheless be criticized for failing to give adequate attention to the affective dimensions of communicative rational action. In this respect, drawing upon existentialist-phenomenological approaches (i.e. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty) to emotions as embodied, purposive, meaningful responses to situations, the author argues that Habermas' approach can usefully absorb and be strengthened by an account of emotional life. Emotional life, in other words, as an existentially embodied mode of being-in-the-world, can and should be seen as interwoven with the fabric of communicative rational action and the constitution of the social world. Despite their differences, however, the linguistic approach and the existential approach both point in a similar direction. Both try to show that emotional life, in principle at least, forms part of the intentional and intersubjective life of human beings, and as such that it falls within the parameters of communicative rationality and the normative order of the lifeworld.

This chapter argues that whilst a sociological approach to emotions involves going beyond the biological to the social, cultural and ideological realms, this does not mean ignoring or leaving out the physiological substrate altogether. In taking this position, the author revisits her earlier work on emotion management, using love as an example. In doing so, she returns to central concepts such as feeling rules, status shields, deep and surface acting, which have profoundly influenced the nature and development of the sociology of emotions over the last two decades. It is on this basis that she is able to fashion her sociological approach to emotions as a new way of seeing the world and our gendered modes of emotionally embodied being within it. Whatever the method of emotion management, the emotions managed are not independent of our management of them. Culture impinges at many points, at the point of recognizing a feeling, at labelling a feeling, at appraising a feeling, at managing a feeling and expressing a feeling. Thus, an emotional strategy useful in defending oneself against the paradox of modern love, provides not simply an emotional armour, but, to some degree, the feelings that are armoured.

This article highlights the content of the book Emotions in Social Life: Critical Themes and Contemporary Issues. In the first part, readers are introduced to a number of differing theoretical perspectives on emotions in social life. Central issues here concern the relationship between biological and social explanations, and the importance of emotions for a more embodied approach to social agency and social (inter)-action. Certainly the role of the biological in social explanation has been an important topic of debate in the sociology of emotions. In this respect, whilst few sociologists would deny the biological underpinnings of emotions, the key question concerns just how important this is. The relationship between emotions and social agency is also addressed. The embodied nature of emotions as the active basis of social agency and social life is also taken up and explicitly addressed by Margot Lyon in Chapter 3 in her critique of the limits of cultural constructionism. Taken together, the chapters, in their differing ways, illustrate the lively nature of theoretical debate within the sociology of emotions, and the relevance of these issues for more general debates within mainstream sociological theory. The time for emotions, in short, has arrived.

The article focuses on the October 1998 issue of the book "The Lived Body." It critically examines the notion of human embodiment in both classical and contemporary social thought. The ideas of a range of key thinkers are assessed in terms of the bodily themes and issues they address. By using the notion of embodiment to transcend the dualist legacies of the past, this book argues that the body is not simply a "textual effect" or "discursive construct." Rather, embodiment is the active basis of being in the world, and the foundation of self, meaning, culture and society. It is not therefore a question of choosing between experience and representation, but of exploring their dialectical relationship to one another, and the emergent properties contained therein. These issues are illustrated through a variety of themes, including the "fate" of embodiment in late modernity, sex, gender and the medical treatment of the body, the sociology of emotions, pain, sleep and artistic images and representations of the body.

This article presents information on the book Emotions in Social Life: Critical Themes and Contemporary Issues. It acts to consolidate the sociology of emotions as a legitimate and viable field of inquiry. It provides a comprehensive state of the art assessment of the sociology of emotions, drawing upon work from scholars of international stature, as well as newer writers in the field. It presents new empirical research in conjunction with innovative and challenging theoretical material, and will be essential reading for students of sociology, health psychology, anthropology and gender studies.